What better time than 4 pm on 22 December to start a blog post.

I saw via Twitter a while ago that YouTube had made it possible to add closed captions (subtitles you can turn on or off) to YouTube videos. This had been something that I’d wanted to do a while ago to our What it means to be a critical student tutorial that I’d blogged about back in September.

You can find the instructions in YouTube’s help centre item called Getting Started: Adding / Editing captions, plus additional instructions on Getting Started: Preparing a Transcript File. I decided that I wanted to test out using a transcript file rather than a caption file as this would be much quicker if it worked – and this is what the help article says about it:

YouTube uses experimental speech recognition technology to provide automatic timing for your English transcript. Automatic timing creates a caption file that you can download. Short videos with good sound quality and clear spoken English synchronize best.

And I tried it and it worked a treat! We already had the script in a word document so I simply pasted it into Notepad, removed any special characters (bullets, in our case) and then uploaded it as per the instructions. The speech recognition software did it’s job brilliantly and timed the captions perfectly. The only errors occurred where Steve (the narrator) had deviated from the script. It was an easy job to edit the transcript on paper whilst watching the captions. I then amended the .txt file and uploaded it again. Fantastic and well done Google on making captioning quick and easy!

Here it is – and just click on the CC icon in the bottom right hand corner menu to turn the captions on.

YOUR CAPTION HERE!

GRANDMA….! You know you’re too old to be eating cake!

(Please add your own caption below in the comments section)

Through the magnificent largesse of the folks over at Namco/Bandai, we have FREE copies of Tekken 6 for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 to give away to two of you lucky readers. Because we’re just that generous, we are also going to toss in a free faceplate or skin for your respective system and maybe a couple other goodies if you act all proper like. The runner-up will ALSO receive a FREE faceplate or skin!

*(UPDATE)*

WE HAVE OUR WINNERS! Thanks to everyone who participated, but as in all contests, ultimately we have to choose a winner and here are those whose efforts were just a little bit better.

Our 2 GRAND PRIZE – FIRST PLACE WINNERS who will each win a BRAND NEW copy of Tekken 6, faceplates or skins and some other assorted goodies are:

Mark: A) Phil? Phil? Don’t you recognize me, it’s Ned… Ryerson. “Needlenose Ned”? “Ned the Head”? C’mon, buddy. Case Western High. I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn’t graduate? I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple times until you told me not to anymore? Well?

RowdyRoddyPaulper: A) I’ve got a message for Steve Phillips’ wife…I’m not just some random girl he had sex with in parking lots.

and our RUNNER UP who will receive a faceplate or skin plus a few other assorted goodies:

Proxy: A: “I ASKED FOR EXTRA FANCY KETCHUP!!”

I have sent emails out to each of our winners, but if for some reason you haven’t seen it yet, send ME an email by going to the CONTACT ME button up top.

And thank you again to Namco Bandai for the games and to all of you for your wonderful contributions! We will have another awesome contest coming up next week that all you NBA fans won’t want to miss!

In order to win these AWESOME and FREE gifts to you, it’s very simple, you need to do TWO things.

1. Join The Slanch Report FACEBOOK FAN page (if you’ve already joined you’re ahead of the game)
2. Submit a caption in the comments for either of these two recent MMA photos (please specify which photo you’re captioning, A or B and make sure you use a valid email address)

That’s it! Not too complicated is it, plus think of all the bragging rights you’ll have across this nation. Not to mention, most importantly, the free copies of one of the greatest fighting games ever! The winners will be determined by me and me alone, and all entries must be in by NOON, THURSDAY DECEMBER 10th. After the jump an absolutely amazing game shot to whet the appetite. Good luck!

A

B

[Photos via Vancouver Sun]

It looks as though it is just about possible to have captions under pictures in posts written with Windows Live Writer. It’s a bit fiddly as it involves inserting some extra code.

The famous sculpture at St Pancras

---

That might answer my needs and still allow me to use this editor.

Write a caption for this picture.

If this were a book jacket, what would the title of the book be?

What would the plot or subject matter of the book be?

It is not necessary to fill in your e-mail address or web site info in the reply area.

The gentle, yet persistent, scrubbing of the reporter voice-over from online video has paved the way for more on screen text.

A large amount of the online video journalism  I watch uses text to move the story forward rather than a voice over (and if they’re really good, they can do it with just the words of their characters).

Text used well is powerful – and can often tell the whole story on its own.

Three examples of text sexiness

01. Penny For Your Thought

A series by Dutch think-tank Freedom Lab has taken the most difficult form of audio possible: phone audio – and made it engaging and interesting with text:

[Hat tip: Kevin Kelly]

02. The Machine Is Us/ing US

A classic of the internet now, but Professor Michael Wesch’s piece uses computer text very effectively here:

03. Entrepreneurs can change the world

This inspiring ditty animates text to lead us through an argument

In MSM text is usually an afterthought, and saved only for Astons and captions of people on screen. But don’t negate them all together. Text offers both video and audio slideshow producers a unique and underused new way into the hearts and minds of the viewer.

Take a gander at the caption for this photo that appeared on wbztv.com. For those of you not from the area, the “Coakley” of the caption actually refers to Martha Coakley, candidate for Massachusetts’ open U.S. Senate seat. Unfortunate oversight or political bias? You decide:

I’m sort of sorry to say that this caption has since been corrected.

h/t JG.

A quick little showing of some of my newest pictures of the Goober in action.  With captions provided by the Nathan Dog himself:

Damn I should have been a model...

I woke up and he was standing over me... I felt so dirty...

I told you I should have been a model... But the crack, man, it got me. So now I have to pull tricks...

I love sleeping on couches, especially at Grandma's.

I believe I can fly... I believe I can touch the sky...

Catch me if you can MOTHERFUCKERS! Hahaha!

You know that feeling you get when you lean back in a chair and almost….but not quite, TIP OVER?

I FEEL LIKE THAT ALL THE TIME.

(Covering the social news from 11/14 through 11/24)

With 2010 just on the horizon, we’re beginningto hear social media predictions and the new strategies that advertisers will be rolling out next year. Here’s a quote I liked from Chris Bruzzo, VP of brand, content and online at Starbucks: ”People are saying this is going to be a big year for social media and we’re a microcosm of that. Whereas last year it was a curiosity, this year it’s a core part of the program.” Starbucks is planning to cut back on its TV spend and invest quite a bit more in social media. Read about their strategy in this story from Ag Age.

LinkedIn has been busy working on sweeping changes to its features and services. Earlier in the month Social Media News reported LinkedIn’s plans for a homepage redesign and the new ability to link Twitter with LinkedIn updates. On Monday, LinkedIn announced that it will open its API to third party developers, a strategy that has been critical to the rapid success of other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Last week, LinkedIn announced a new program for advanced group pages, called Custom Groups. Currently, LinkedIn group pages are little more than discussion forums. With Custom Groups, organizations can transform their group page to a central, multimedia social hub that will allow groups to post videos, white papers and feeds. The program costs $50,000 a month, however LinkedIn will include advertising support to drive traffic to the custom groups. Lastly, LinkedIn and Microsoft are joining forces to sync Outlook contacts with LinkedIn information. In the 2010 release, Outlook users will be able to quickly view LinkedIn user activity and information of their contacts as a subpane of the email window. These are very smart updates to the LinkedIn product offering, and will ensure that LinkedIn becomes an even more powerful business social networking tool for individuals as well as businesses and organizations.

A couple small updates on the Twitter front:

The Twitter Geolocation API has been officially released, however we won’t see anything new on Twitter.com just yet. For now, the release is significant for several third party developers that have built applications that will utilize the Geolocation feature, like Foursquare and Seesmic.

Twitter has also made a small improvement to its new Twitter Lists feature, allowing users to add descriptions to their Lists. It’s a nice-to-have, but personally I can’t wait to see Twitter roll out the ability to search Lists. I believe the lack of a search feature is the single most crippling disadvantage for Twitter Lists.

HootSuite is a Twitter publishing and management tool preferred by many, including myself. New updates launched this week allows HootSuite users to connect their Facebook and LinkedIn accounts for the first time. In addition, HootSuite users can create new columns to pull in their Twitter Lists feeds.

YouTube also released new updates this week:

YouTube Direct is a new platform for professional news organizations to solicit and utilize video content from citizen journalists. It’s an API that news media can incorporate on their existing websites to allow individuals to submit video coverage around current events. The news organization’s moderate can preview submitted material on a backend interface, then choose whether to approve the material to be linked from their site. Get the details from MediaPost.

Google has matched its speech recognition technology with YouTube’s caption feature to unveil a new automated video captioning service. Laurie Sullivan from MediaPost explains how the new service will have a big impact on SEO.

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday!

Ad Age

Behind the Redesign: Virgin.com Mixes Social Activity and Lead Generation

Starbucks Rings in the Holidays With Big Social-Media Push

Bing: an America’s Hottest Brands Case Study

Brands on Twitter: 76% of Accounts Are Infrequent Users

Why Murdoch Can Afford to Leave Google for Bing

Ad Week

Is Facebook Getting Uncool for 18-24s?

Social Media Users Really Are More Social

Brand Sweepstakes Get Twitterized

Media Post

Facebook Targeting Fans’ “Connections”

100 Ways To Measure Social Media

Brightcove Unveils Latest Platform, Integrates Mobile and Social Functionality

Q+A: Razorfish’s Shiv Singh On ‘Social Media For Dummies’

YouTube Unveils Tool To Connect News Organizations With Citizen Journalists

LinkedIn Launches Custom Groups For Marketers

YouTube Automated Captioning Changes Game For SEO

LinkedIn Opens Up To Outside Developers

Mashable

Toys R Us Explodes on Facebook With Black Friday Preview

HootSuite Adds Support for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter Lists

How Google Wave Is Changing The News

Twitter Lists: Now You Can Add Descriptions!

TechCrunch

Blogging Vs. Microblogging: Twitter’s Global Growth Flattens, While WordPress’ Picks Up

Salesforce Chatter: A Real-Time Social Network For The Enterprise

Microsoft Outlook To Become Even More LinkedIn

Foursquare Continues Its ground Assault With 50 More Cities

Twitter Turns On Location. Not For Twitter.com Just Yet.

Blogs and Other News Sources

Clearing up the Clutter (Smart Marketing)

Chrome Unveiled; Microsoft Cheers (PC World)

Google Unveils Chrome OS; Tech World Yawns (PC World)

Καθώς το Youtube προσφέρει upload για  υπότιτλους για μερικά χρόνια , σήμερα είναι ακόμα πιο εύκολο να εισαχθούν.

Τώρα το Youtube μπορεί αυτόματα να βάλει τους υπότιτλους σε ένα βίντεο χρησιμοποιώντας την αναγνώριση φωνής(speech recognition)Επιπλέον,μπορείτε τώρα να σύνταξετε έγγραφο για τα βίντεό σας, το οποίο βοηθά στην περαιτέρω ακριβή τοποθεσία  για την προσθήκη των υποτίτλων. Μπορείτε να μεταφράσετε αυτούς τούς υπότιτλους σε πάρα πολλές γλώσσες, όταν παρακολούθείτε το βίντεο.

Η Google εξηγεί:

“We’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.

We’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video.”

Google announced last week that they are introducing an automatic captioning facility for YouTube videos.  In the official Google blog they state that every minute 20 hours of video are uploaded.  The chances of each individual video owner taking the time and effort to caption each of their videos is unlikely.  It means that most user generated content on the video sharing site is inaccessible to people who are Deaf or hearing impaired.

It uses their own automatic speech recognition (ASR)  technology combined with the existing YouTube captioning system to automatically produce captions – auto-caps for short.  It is initially only available on a number of mainly educational channels.  Although ASR has been around for a while in the GoogleVoice application it has never been deployed on such a large-scale before.

An additional facility that has also been introduced is automatic timing.  If a video owner already has a transcript, they can upload this as a text file with the video and the software will automatically link the words in the transcript with the sounds on the video.

Both of these features are not only suitable for viewers with hearing difficulties but make content available in more languages.  The facility is only available in English but using the Google translation tool they can be translated into a number of languages.

Obviously this is not an exact science and mistakes are bound to occur but even with the problems, auto-caps is a major step forward in making all videos accessible.

Granted, I’ve got warm fuzzy feelings for the concept now, not the least because of the program letting me have a no-credit-card-needed iTunes account. But there are some real problems.

1) The WMV version requires Windows Media Player 11.

This would normally be just an issue of ‘Oh, I need to run Windows Update to get the newest version’. In fact, that would have been true through Media Player 10.

With 11, there is no longer a way to backup media licenses manually. The content provider gets to decide how many times – and if at all – you get to ‘renew’ the license.

In other words, if the kid the DVD was bought for gets a computer of his or her own in high school, you may have to forget transferring it over from the parental machine it was registered with.

I chose the iTunes version because of this.

An iTunes account has leeway of allowing four complete No Chance To Deauthorize computer crashes and still having the file readable on one device. As long as older devices are deauthorized, the file can be moved from machine to machine as a child grows with no problem. If she wants to take the complete Disney princess collection with her to college on her laptop, no problem even if the files were generated years ago so long as there’s an open authorization spot for the laptop. (Well, problem if her classmates don’t think college students should like Disney princesses, but that’s not Disney’s or Apple’s problem.)

Windows Media? From what I’ve been reading online, a DRMed WMV or WMA file may not be readable after an intentional and planned OS reinstall. I tend to reimage at a frequency of under 6 months, and from what I can tell the WMP identifiers for protected files aren’t in the factory image I use.

2) Differences in policy for WMV versus iTunes

Someone choosing the Windows Media option? Only gets one chance to make the file. After that, the code is used and there is no second chance. If a small child accidentally deletes the file from the system instead of just from a playlist, tough luck unless you made a backup. And backing it up requires about 2 gigs of space, or a blank DVD and DVD burner.

The iTunes version? Can be remade at any time using an iTunes installation authorized for the same account. I’m not sure if it still works after the expiration date, but at the very least until then the file can be remade whenever. I’ll test it once mine is supposed to expire (with the file stuck safely away from iTunes’ view, rather than just flat-out deleting it, of course).

This mattered greatly to me. When I started making the file, iTunes tried to put it in a location that didn’t have enough room. I had to point my library to a different location and then start the ‘download’ over. If this had happened while using the Windows Media option, I’m not sure I’d have gotten a file out of the process.

3) Digital Copies? Expire.

No, not the file you make. Don’t worry, Disney is not just renting you the digital version of the movie.

However…

They have set it up so the code in the DVD case is only good for a year… from the time the DVD was released.

So, if someone gets into Narnia movies with the release of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is only just now in production, the digital copy in a DVD set of Prince Caspian will have expired before it was even purchased, even if bought new. (Even if bought directly from Disney.)

If a child with a July birthday receives as a present a DVD released for the previous Christmas season, half or more of the activation window will already be gone.

This also means that someone knowing they will be changing systems or upgrading an OS in the next few years cannot just sit on the WMV version until making the transition. They have to make a choice about what to do, given instructions that even in the online long form assume that the current OS install and system will be used in perpetuity or that there’s a way to move Windows Media identity with the system change (see #1 above).

4) And yes, I know it’s a corporate sore point at the moment, but…

Could there have been a captionable option?

I mean, okay, chances are if you’re carrying a Digital Copy around on an iPhone or iPod any text overlaid over video is going to be well-nigh impossible to read. I watched Between The Lions on someone’s video iPod once, and there was no reading half of what was meant to be read from across a room in the broadcast version.

But that’s not true for netbooks and laptops.

Leaving out the standard arguments of accessibility, I wrote papers in college that referenced C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I took film courses. I’ve even considered talking about the differences between the movies and the books here, because I am one of the people who does like both as what they are.

Not all movies that have Digital Copies are aimed at the little kids. And there are some serious academics who look at the Disney movies that are aimed at the little kids.

Being able to quote accurately without having to break out the DVD or look for a transcript of questionable legality would have been a godsend in those film courses. It would be a godsend when discussing films online.

And really, given the price of 1 TB portable externals on the market now, technologies like Digital Copy should become industry-standard, in my opinion, for the good of the movie companies. The space makes it too easy to just .iso archive an entire film library, and if the MPAA doesn’t want people doing that or using CSS breakers to rip the video, there ought to be legal alternatives that don’t require much effort on the part of the user.

Developing the technology for doing that with Digital Copy and similar programs would also spread the capacity around for downloadable video files. Need the entirety of the original Star Trek series for a paper, and need it quotable? The free youtube series channel does not have captions or subs. Someone might be willing to pay just for the captions, even if the same image quality was free elsewhere.

But right now, the parent of a Deaf child can rip the video off a DVD with the subtitles there, and can’t chose to show captioning at all with the Digital Copy that came with that DVD. A student working from a netbook in a noisy dorm may find looking for that online dialogue rip easier than trying to get hallmates to quiet down.

And sooner or later, that’s going to need to change.

As it is, Digital Copy was incredibly easy to use for me. The process of setting up an iTunes account was quick, and the file was created in less time than it would have taken to watch the opening credits.

But for others, who need the subs or captions to watch anything at all, this isn’t easier than looking at the not-legal rippers.

…

Shorter version: I like it. I’m pleased. I’ll probably post again with reasons I’m pleased. But like any relatively new technology, it needs some work – and a lot of it is not Disney’s problem, but issues with the technology that was widespread enough for them to use.